Socialising in America

The decline of an American institution

AMERICANS are still famously neighbourly (especially compared to Europeans) but they’re getting less so.

A new book released last week, "Social Trends in American Life", sees a group of prominent American social scientists presenting and explaining the results of the General Social Survey—an ongoing study that has regularly recorded and tracked changes in social attitudes and make-up since the early 1970s. Every other year, researchers collect detailed information from a large random sample of American adults in order to understand how American society is evolving.

For the most part, the results are unsurprising. Americans are now more tolerant towards minorities (immigrants, gays and blacks) than they were in the 1970s—an outcome that is probably a function of tolerant younger people replacing conservative elderly. Americans now express less confidence in public institutions (except for the military) than they once did. Happiness levels have stayed relatively constant, which many think might be a product of religious observance remaining relatively steady.

But one trend in the pattern of American social life is curious: Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbours than before. In 1974, 44% of respondents said that they had spent a social evening with neighbours more than once a month. By 2008, that number had dropped to a tick over 30%. Over the course of the study’s existence, the number has been dropping consistently.

The effect is not quite uniform. The likelihood of socialising with neighbours more than once a month declines with age but levels off among the middle-aged before a brief fillip among the elderly. By way of contrast, there have been steady increases in the number of people who socialise with friends (43%) or relatives (60%) more than once a month. Moreover, it is highly dependent on location. People in rural areas are much more likely to spend time with their neighbours than those in urban areas. Residents of suburbs exhibit the lowest level of neighbourliness.

What should we make of this?

Most interestingly, it complicates life for the cottage industry of sociologists who have been arguing that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in more like-minded communities. It seems that even if people are attracted to living with similar types, that does not mean they want to spend much time with them. One popular theory, Bill Bishop’s "the Big Sort", argues that Americans are becoming both socially and politically polarised. Liberals are seeking to live in liberal areas every bit as much as conservatives seek the comfort of living with other conservatives. At a presidential level, there are now many more landslide counties than before as communities have become more decisively Democratic or Republican.

The Big Sort theory may be overstated. Voter registration figures demonstrate more people are choosing to register as independent rather than Republican or Democrat. And a lot of the decline in cross-over voting is simply just the national parties becoming organised on a more ideological basis. People who were once moderate Republicans are now Democrats and people who were once conservative Democrats are now Republicans.

But there is still some reason to think that polarisation is becoming a little more hard-wired into the electoral landscape and that geography and community life probably plays a role. The 2008 election saw fewer closely decided states (where the margin of victory was less than 5%) than any other in recent memory. Comparable victories in the past have shown a more evenly distributed swing. At the same time as most states were swinging to the Democrats, other states were actually becoming more Republican. In 2012, if current polling trends hold, Barack Obama may be the first incumbent president since James Madison to fail to add a new state to his electoral coalition while still being re-elected. (Although even Madison added the then newly admitted state of Louisiana.)

An absence of neighbourliness might make this process more acute. Reduced interaction with fellow citizens probably only reinforces a person’s own beliefs. However like-minded a neighbourhood is the odds of friends and relatives sharing similar political views seems much higher. High levels of partisanship already seem to be translating into elevated cognitive dissonance. Republican voters, for example, have been all too willing to believe a range of strange fictions: that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, that Mitt Romney ordered the mission to kill Osama bin Laden or that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

How social interaction conditions political outcomes is not always clear. In 2000, Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, made waves with his book, "Bowling Alone". His concern was that civic life in America was fast disappearing and that this would have dire political consequences. Fewer people were members of community or social associations, a trend made most visible by the prevalence of people bowling alone rather than in teams or leagues. Countries that lack a dense network of civic life are often undemocratic or poorly governed as citizens have less regard for each other.

The primary culprit here is suburbanisation. Suburban life for most Americans is far from the bed-hopping intrigues depicted in "Desperate Housewives". Instead, big houses, wide streets and lengthy commutes reduce the chance of running into neighbours, let alone becoming friends. Technology too has made staying in contact with friends and relatives easier than in the past, decreasing the need or time available to meet those over the fence. Just as voters can tailor their media diet to avoid unwanted opinions they can now calibrate their friendships to avoid those with the wrong opinions.

Yet fortunately, these trends are all still embryonic. Election season always exaggerates and magnifies differences as candidates seek to build an electoral coalition. For all that America remains divided into blue states and red states, the dominant hue is really purple. Look no further than this week’s image of Scott Walker, the union-busting Republican governor of Wisconsin, chastising the National Football League for locking out its unionised referees to understand that even in America some issues are too important for political point scoring. If nothing else, the neighbours can agree that football is one of them.

Can someone point to any studies on actual rates of child abductions? If it didn't actually go up, what is the justification for the upheaval in protectiveness?

Nowadays kids are only glimpsed trekking 20 feet from the garage to the SUV. Then off they go to one planned supervised activity or another with nearly identical peers. With no roving bands of kids, kids and parents have no cause for serendipitous interaction.

Suburbanization is the problem on so many levels. For some reason, the American ideal life has become getting married, having children, and then interacting with anyone who is not your spouse or children as little as humanly possible. The entire set up of the suburbs is based on not having to leave your house--you've got a gourmet kitchen so you don't have to eat out, you've got a yard and play equipment so good forbid you ever have to use a public park, then you've got a home theater, home gym equipment, and a keggerator in the basement. Not only do you have to drive everywhere so you never have to take public transportation or see other people walking down the street, there are no places close by to just hang out. In most American suburbs you can't even just walk to the bar for a pint or take your laptop and hang out at Starbucks. I'm not really "friends" with any of my direct neighbors in my urban area, but I do interact with them all the time. I don't know, urban rent is getting really expensive for me and I may have kids in the near future, but I lived in the suburbs for a couple years I don't know if I could take going back. There's something about a single-family house that is so depressing to me.

I disagree that it's suburbanization. I spent much of my youth in suburbs back when all the neighborhood kids met up after school to ride our bikes in circles. The same neighborhoods these days are barren. All the kids are in-doors playing Warcraft. If they go out to ride their bikes, it's with their parents with bike helmets, pads, and reflectors.

I spent my latter years in the city. To play basketball, you need to set a time with friends, reserve a court, then take the train to the courts. I hear plenty of old city folks complain about the loss of neighborhoodness. Back when kids played with fire hydrants on the streets until their parents yelled out their apartment windows, "Dinner!"

Today, people from all over the world come together, in a profound expression of human understanding, to pwn noobs. Frankly, I think it's kind of awesome that the other day I was listening to a 35 year old accountant from Minneapolis and a French college student strategizin'.

In my experience, people my age (I'm 21) tend to know much less about gov't and policy than older folks. They also (myself included) mostly have either only worked part-time during the summer or never held a job at all. Furthermore, I do not think that they do not vote because they are busy working and drinking. Rather they do not vote because they do not care. Or, to put negatively, they are apathetic and lazy

60 year olds, on the other hand, have for the most part not retired yet and so would not be taken on a bus to a voting booth. They have held full-time jobs for decades, witnessed multiple presidential administrations, and, in general, have experience. Granted, those activities do not necessarily cause them to have more nuanced, penetrating views on political candidates.

On the whole, I would probably trust the view of the average 60 year old than the average 20 year old. However, now that I think about it, trusting the average person of any age on any political matter seems quite silly.

About five years back, Jan Brueckner (a superb urban economist at UC Irvine) actually ran some regressions on this and found that the likelihood of interacting with one's neighbors goes down as population density goes up. This is after controlling for age, income, family status, various ethnic factors, and all the other usual suspects. I suspect there's a sweet spot of density, but apartment living definitely can be alienating.

While that's a contributor, I wouldn't make too much of it. My parents bought their home from a Chinese couple who had been living in the exclusively white neighborhood since the 60's. They said there was a time when neighborhood dinner parties were a regular occurrence including an annual Chinese New Year dinner. You don't see that today even in Chinatowns.

Very good post, but I get a little weary of the whole topic. Who cares about Democrats and Republicans? They aren't even real and unicorns, at least, if fictional, are pretty. The meat's delicious too.

I live in a blue-turned-"purple" state. Our biggest city is not all that big - about 100,000 population. Until 5 years ago I and my wife were renting a high-rise apartment downtown. We knew almost everyone in our building. Mostly college students and empty-nesters.
5 years ago, we bought a house in suburbia as we were planning to start a family. Paid top dollar. This was 2007. Bad timing, but that's for another post.
In the past five years, we've learned the first names of just 4 of our neighbors. And except for the nice couple who watches our 2-year-old and the other nice couple who let him play with their poodle, all others in the small subdivision are just "hi, chilly today, bye".
My first encounter with a neighbor was when I went to pick up the mail, and the nice old lady next door also was at her mailbox, and I said, "Hi neighbor", and she said, "I hope you guys don't kill your neighbors".
That's contemporary small-town America for you.

P.S.: I am brown-skinned and have a biggish nose. My wife is brown-skinned but has a cute nose :-)

Decline is not quite the word. The world has completed a project that began thousands of years ago in earnest-attaining the Moon or Sun or something up there-and the premises for that goal existed when octopuses and other neural creatures were drawn back and forth by the tides.

This is roughly like a farmer who has completed a barn and is now putting away the tools of that construction, to begin filling its loft with hay, bringing the stock in, and setting up other barn facilities. NOW we know what the world is-really is, actually is, and actually will be for millions of years.

Fortunately, attainment of space flight revealed a whole universe of new truth, particularly about the Earth as the only world we live on, and largely made war obsolete. Human beings see, understand and are undertaking the solutions of chronic problems, such as inequality and exposure to the elements, health and how not to make a healthy population well fitted to the planet's size, into an infestation or plague upon all other life on it.

In the fifties it was predicted that when we began eating the krill, the world would be at the end game of population expansion and the beginning of famines. Now krill are on the menu. Thus human beings are looking at the planet with meticulous care.

Just so, a good farmer, seeing the magnitude and limitations on the farm's resources, keeps it in apple pie order. It is prosperous and occupied by all the life appropriate to its operation, and not crowded it too much, nor strained in its sustaining capacity.

The careful, thorough enduring and meticulous thought, decisions, dialogue and communications about the Earth in an continual, ongoing way-an area in which The Economist and its readers are becoming expert, is of increasing value worldwide. Economics, for all its dismal gloom, may be about as close to God as rational collective thought can be.

I'm sure that many of these factors can be attributed to the declining rate of stay-at-home mothers, who at one time formed a network of communication, organization and oversight in the neighborhoods. Nowadays almost nobody's home by day and if they are they're on a conference call.

However I agree with previous posts that blame the eletronicopalypse and/or the TV-fostered trend to form our neighborhoods based on children's activity groups and work associations rather than by simple geography. Why work so hard to find common ground with neighbors, when ready-made groups of people with narrow shared (the more superficial the better) interests are just a short luxury SUV-ride away?

Unfortunately, "spending an evening with..." is a limited measure of social interaction and not very informative for the Big Sort question. Parents' decisions about schools are a good place to look to reconcile the findings that so confound the post's author.

My wife and I had our son before selecting a home to buy, and thus a neighborhood in which we would live and presumably send our child to school. When we considered buying a place in the city or various suburbs, we thoroughly researched the political climate of each prospective location.

We cared about the political climate, not because we were worried about Confederate flags flying in our neighborhood, but because the children of those flag fliers would be our child's peers.

We don't want our child to be the lonely outcast, who doesn't understand why everyone else in class thinks climate change is a hoax, or must challenge his teachers' barely-hidden prejudices, while the other kids roll their eyes. This is not to mention sitting in the stands at soccer games next to Confederate flag-wavers or enduring PTA disputes about whether to include intelligent design as part of the science curriculum.

Admittedly, no matter who they are, we don't really care about our neighbors or intend to have dinner with them, but we are obviously part of the Big Sort.